The standard for a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) technology is established by IEEE 802.11 standard association. IEEE 802.11a/b among IEEE 802.11 standards provides 11 Mbps (IEEE 802.11b) or 54 Mbps (IEEE 802.11a) transmission efficiency using unlicensed band on 2.4. GHz or 5 GHz frequency band. IEEE 802.11g, adapting OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Divisional Multiplexing) technology, provides 54 Mbps transmission efficiency. And, IEEE 802.11n, adapting MIMO-OFDM technology, provides 300 Mbps transmission efficiency for 4 spatial streams. IEEE 802.11n provides 40 MHz channel bandwidth, and in this case it provides up to 600 Mbps transmission efficiency.
Now, a standard for regulating the WLAN operation in TV White Space is under establishment, as IEEE 802.11af.
TV Whitespace includes channels allocated to broadcast TV, which are permitted to be used by cognitive radio device. TV White Space may include UHF band and VHF band. The spectrum not used by a licensed device (hereinafter, can be called as ‘White Space’) can be used by an unlicensed device. The frequency band permitted to be used by unlicensed device can be differently defined for each country. Generally, this frequency band comprises 54-698 MHz (US, Korea), and some of this frequency band can't be used for the unlicensed device. Here, ‘licensed device’ means a device of the user permitted in this frequency band, and can be differently called as ‘primary user’, or ‘incumbent user’. Hereinafter, the term of ‘incumbent user’ can be collectively used for these terms.
512-608 MHz and 614-698 MHz are permitted to be used by all kinds of unlicensed devices except a few of special cases. However, 54-60 MHz, 76-88 MHz, 174-216 MHz and 470-512 MHz are permitted to be used by fixed devices, which perform transmission at a fixed location.
Unlicensed device should provide a protection mechanism for the incumbent user. That is, the unlicensed device should stop using a specific channel, when an incumbent user, such as wireless microphone, is using that specific channel.
Therefore, the unlicensed device, which wishes to use the TV White Space (TVWS), shall acquire information for available channel list at its location. Hereinafter, the unlicensed device operating in the TVWS using MAC (Medium Access Control) and PHY (Physical) operation according to IEEE 802.11 can be called as TVWS terminal.
The unlicensed device acquires a list of available channels having a first channel granularity and operates using channels having the second channel granularity.
For example, in order to operate in TVWS as an unlicensed device, a station (STA) should find the network to be connected. This type of process may be called as ‘scanning’. Whiles the unlicensed device acquired available TV channel list have a first channel granularity, it performs scanning on a WLAN channel. Thus, algorithm for converting TV channels into WLAN channels is necessary.